Time To Beat Back This One

Kevin Drum finds a nugget in the New York Times writeup on the "amazing, radical shift in US policy" regarding Iran:

Few of his aides expect that Iran's leaders will meet Mr. Bush's main condition: that Iran first re-suspend all of its nuclear activities, including shutting down every centrifuge that could add to its small stockpile of enriched uranium....And while the Europeans and the Japanese said they were elated by Mr. Bush's turnaround, some participants in the drawn-out nuclear drama questioned whether this was an offer intended to fail, devised to show the extent of Iran's intransigence.

...."Cheney was dead set against it," said one former official....But three officials who were involved in the most recent iteration of that debate said Mr. Cheney and others stepped aside — perhaps because they read Mr. Bush's body language, or perhaps because they believed Iran would scuttle the effort....In the end, said one former official who has kept close tabs on the debate, "it came down to convincing Cheney and others that if we are going to confront Iran, we first have to check off the box" of trying talks.

It's time to get very loud about this. The media is calling this a "radical shift in policy" when it isn't. And they're going to be faked out of their skulls again. The Cheney Administration just wants to "check off the box" and give the appearance of diplomacy. They did the same thing with Iraq. And the media is falling for it again. I can't believe they're this stupid.

You aren't agreeing to talks when the condition for the talks is the other side stopping the only thing they want to talk about.

The intention here is to get Iran to dismiss the talks. That's worked. Now the Administration can claim that they tried, but Iran leaves the West no choice.

I can only hope that at the back channel there are more substantive negotiations going on, and what's being played out in the media is not all that's going on. But I'm not hopeful.

THIS IS NOT A SHIFT IN POLICY. It's an attempt to trap Iran into forcing Bush's hand.